How Brian Wilson found his 'Smile'

September 26, 2004|By Greg Kot Tribune music critic.

To hear Brian Wilson tell it, it wasn't his idea to bring his lost '60s album, "Smile," back to life. Left to his own devices, the songwriter would just as soon have let "Smile" stay where he left it 37 years ago, a bad '60s memory that began with such grandiose ambitions -- nothing less than a "teenage symphony to God" -- but ended in acrimony, shame and mental dissolution. "Smile" is now routinely referred to as the greatest lost album in pop history. At 24, Wilson was the dominant pop mastermind of his era, and "Smile" was to be his crowning achievement in 1967, the follow-up to his acclaimed album "Pet Sounds" and groundbreaking single "Good Vibrations." But its dense orchestral arrangements and elliptical lyrics (written by Wilson's handpicked collaborator, a precociously talented producer and songwriter named Van Dyke Parks) were mocked by his Beach Boys bandmates and questioned by his record company, who both desired more "typical" sun-and-surf music from the company meal ticket. Wilson abandoned "Smile" before completing it, and soon after became one of rock's most celebrated recluses. He would not perform in public for three decades, suffering through mental illness, the deaths of his brothers and Beach Boys bandmates Carl and Dennis Wilson, and the burden of living up to his reputation as a composer who once awed both Leonard Bernstein and the Beatles. But at 62, Wilson finds himself in the midst of a late-career roll. A few years ago, he performed the entirety of "Pet Sounds" in concert for the first time in a rapturously received tour. Now he has resurrected "Smile."

Last year, he went back into the studio with Parks and his touring band to cobble together the abandoned songs that make up what Wilson calls his "three-movement rock opera."

After countless bootlegs and unauthorized releases pieced together from studio outtakes, "Smile" (Nonesuch) finally receives its official release Tuesday, 37 years after it was left for dead. Now the Beach Boys auteur is taking it on the road; a national tour arrives Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre, as part of a concert that will feature Wilson performing songs from throughout his career around a set devoted entirely to "Smile."

"My managers and my wife got together and thought it was time for the world to hear `Smile,' finally," Wilson says in an interview from his Los Angeles home. The singer does not hide his ambivalence. In a 1998 interview with the Tribune, Wilson called the original "Smile" sessions "a bad experience for me; it brings back some bad memories." To those who call it a lost masterpiece, he had a pithy response: "They're not missing much."

Parks, in an interview a decade ago, echoed that sentiment. "It galls me that it's referred to as this unfinished masterpiece," he said. "It embarrasses me."

Even now, Wilson has little good to say about the experience. "I had a lot of bad memories about the drugs I was taking at that time," he says. "I was going through a lot of bad head changes. And Van Dyke was also going through a lot of bad changes. We got to the point where we couldn't go any further. We knew it was advanced and avant-garde and too ahead of its time, so we junked it."

But in recent years, Wilson was coaxed into revisiting the songs. For the first time in decades, he says, he feels "safe and loved," thanks to his wife of nine years, Melinda, and musical collaborators who consider it an honor to work with him. In the late '90s he abandoned the bickering Beach Boys in favor of a 10-piece touring band that includes a handful of Chicagoans recruited when Wilson briefly lived in west suburban St. Charles (where he gave his first solo concert in 1998). Their unwavering enthusiasm for his music, particularly "Pet Sounds" and "Smile," slowly helped him overcome some of his insecurities.